Venezuela: Electoral fraud, intimidation and abuse of power

Today, lawyer Tulio Alvarez presented his final report on the fraud in the recall referendum, the evidence is truly remarkable once the analysis of the telecommunications is included. You can find Alvarez’ full report here, it is quite long and dense, but it has a lot of stuff in it. I am translating a shorter version to post on it and link to it.

But let’s start at the beginning. Alvarez had hired a room at a local hotel (Eurobuilding) to hold his press conference. When the management of the hotel found out what the press conference was going to be about they cancelled, for fear of reprisal from the Chavez Government.

Alvarez had to change to La Piragua a place that is used to hold weddings and other events. Just when the event was about to begin, two or three motorcycles with two guys riding them showed up and began throwing tear gas bombs at the crowd. This delayed the beginning of the press conference for obvious reasons.

Alvarez then began his press conference. During his whole talk, he had as a background a movie taken at one of the secret data centers used by the CNE and the Government on August 15th. to interfere with the results of the recall vote. The video consists of a complete and detailed movie of every single piece of equipment at the data center, including front and back, serial numbers, brand names and model numbers. Most of the equipment was not only computing equipment, but also telecommunications equipment. (We hope to have the video or parts of it on the Internet next week) Alvarez also showed bills to PDVSA for some of the equipment found in the room. These were not old PDVSA systems, many were brand new. He also showed a letter from the CNE saying the equipment will be removed and sent to Pasadena, California (??).

Alvarez went beyond that, he also named the operators of the center, four Mexicans and one Chilean as well as every single member of the military that was involved in the center. He showed copies of the passports of these people. He called on the Ministry of Defense to explain what exactly these officers have been assigned to in the last few months.

There are two main new and strong charges by Alvarez, which I will detail as I have time:

-The voting machines, besides being connected to the CNE were connected to three secret data centers. Each voting machine had an IP number assigned and they have copies of all of the data traffic that went through the CANTV farm servers during the recall day. With this, they could reconstruct where the data was going to and the IP numbers of the computers at the three centers. These three centers were located at the 'Universidad Bolivariana', Ministry of Science and a building in downtown Caracas at the esquina del Chorro. There was incoming and outgoing data from and to the machines all day on August 15th. , this has all been quantified, measured and even read.

-Using the information from the data traffic, some of the scientific studies that I have mentioned and other methods, they were able to determine that all methods point to 18% of the voting machines being tampered with, this represent 2.55 million votes in those centers in which the No option received 68% of the vote. All methods point to the same machines. From this they were able to reconstruct the true results of Aug. 15th and yes, the Si won.

Alvarez said the data will be available to any group that wants to look at it and challenged anyone to show his conclusions are incorrect.

I will try to report summarize in the next few days as much as I can of these reports.

Finally, while the press conference was preceded by two different acts of intimidation, it closed in an amazing case of abuse of power when the live broadcast of Tulio Alvarez’ press conference, which was only being broadcast by on TV station, was interrupted by a an impromptu press conference by none other than CNE Director Jorge Rodriguez. The announcement was essentially irrelevant; he came on nationwide TV to say that he will propose on Monday to the full board of the CNE that the day of the regional elections one box from each voting center be counted. This was a proposal made by the opposition and has yet to be approved, so clearly the whole purpose was to block the transmission of Alvarez’ press conference. Rodriguez even took questions from reporters, something eh seldom allows.

This is the pseudo-democracy we are living in. One in which intimation is the rule of the day, where Government officials abuse their power for political gain, using free air time only given to the Government to block the presentation showing that they are a bunch of crooks. But the saddest part is that despite the seriousness of the charges, neither the Attorney General nor the People’s Ombudsman has or will do anything about it, despite the severity of the charges presented.